The present invention relates generally to graphical user interfaces, and more specifically, to displaying images using circular graphical user interfaces.
Picture presentations are an important aspect of many professional and social settings. Executives make presentations to directors, managers conduct meetings with staff, salespersons make presentations to potential customers, doctors conduct meetings with nurses, lawyers make presentations to juries, and families and friends present and share photographs of occasions in their lives.
Frequently, much effort goes into generating and delivering effective picture presentations. With specialized software, conventional personal computer systems can provide effective platforms for generating and conducting presentations. Currently available presentation program modules can turn a personal computer into a customized presentation system for generating and delivering picture presentations using display terminals or digital projectors.
Generally described, these prior art presentation systems provide a specially designed, user-friendly, pallet of tools to assist in the generation of a presentation to be subsequently displayed to an audience. These presentation systems also allow the pictures to be sequentially presented to an audience, picture-by-picture, with color, animation, audio, and transition effects that enrich and enliven the presentation.
Conventional presentation systems do not provide an effective means for interacting with the content of the presentation during the course of the presentation. This drawback arises because these conventional presentation systems have only two modes of operation, an edit mode and a show mode. A single user often generates the presentation, and then subsequently delivers the same presentation to an audience. During the course of the presentation, the single user can interact with the content of the presentation only by invoking the edit mode, which primarily allows the user to rearrange the order in which the presentation is arranged.
A significant drawback arises when using these conventional presentation systems because all other participants of the presentation cannot concurrently interact with the content of the presentation. Conventional systems are designed for use by a single presenter to a passive audience, and not for a setting where all participants of the presentation interact with the presentation on an equal footing. The presentation is typically conducted in a linear setting. The presenter faces the audience, and the audience views the presentation behind the presenter. The presenter can either look at the audience or the presentation, but not at both at the same time.
Furthermore, a conventional presentation system only has a single set of controls. To allow any one other than the presenter to control the presentation can be quite disruptive and cumbersome. Also, most computer implemented presentation systems that concurrently display multiple pictures use the same rectangular format as used by mechanical slide-sorter. These require that the typical single user has a specific orientation with respect to the displayed presentation. These types of systems are not suited for situations where multiple participants are facing each other and the displayed presentation, in a highly interactive and multi-dimensional manner.
An alternative presentation system can use a circular display surface, such as a tabletop. There are many advantages of tabletop displays over traditional presentation systems, such as white boards, projection screen, desktops computers, or handheld devices, particularly for collaborative tasks where multiple users need to both work with each other and access computer resources.
Users can sit around a table and thus easily face each other, rather than try to crowd around a computer screen, or a small handheld device. A tabletop provides shared space and also allows users to have their own personal, if not entirely private, space to work on. Finally, whether it is an electronic display or not, a tabletop affords a convenient space where users can spread out and organize images. Recently, a number of alternative display systems have been described, see for example: Wellner P., xe2x80x9cThe DigitalDesk Calculator: Tangible Manipulation on a Desk Top Display,xe2x80x9d Proceedings of UIST ""91, ACM Press, pp. 27-33, November 1991; Wellner P., xe2x80x9cInteracting with Paper on the DigitalDesk,xe2x80x9d Comm. ACM Vol. 36, 7, pp. 86-96, 1993; Streitz, N. et al. xe2x80x9ci-LAND: An Interactive Landscape for Creativity and Innovation,xe2x80x9d Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI""99), pp. 120-127, 1999; Prante, T., Muller-Tomfelde, C., Streitz, N., Steinmetz, R., xe2x80x9cConnecTables: Dynamic Coupling of Displays for the Flexible Creation of Shared Workspace,xe2x80x9d Proceedings of the 14th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST""01), November, 2001; and Guimbretiere, F., Stone, M., Winograd, T., xe2x80x9cFluid Interaction with High-resolution Wall-size Displays,xe2x80x9d Proceedings of the 14th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST""01), November, 2001.
The DigitalDesk is a physical desk augmented with vision and projector capabilities so that the physical and electronic desktops are merged into one. DigitalDesk is designed for a single user. The InteracTable in the i-Land project provides a rectangular surface for multiple users. However, most of these tabletop user interfaces organize images in a rectangular manner. It is desired to provide a circular graphical user interface.
The invention provides visualization and layout schemes for a circular graphical user interface. Because the interface uses polar coordinate systems to display images, prior techniques, which typically use Cartesian coordinate systems, are inapplicable.
It is an object of the invention to give the user of the interface the full capability to relocate, re-orient, scale and layout images in the circular interface.
It is another object to provide methods to layout images in the Cartesian coordinate system.
It is also an object to minimize overlapping and crowding of images.
It is an object to support users"" focus in a group setting for group collaboration around the interface.
More particularly, a system and method visualize images selected from a database on a circular graphical user interface. Each selected image is oriented with respect to a global polar coordinate system, a local polar coordinate system, and a radial distance from the center of each image to the center of a display surface of the circular graphical user interface. A global angle xcex1 of the global polar coordinate system measures rotation of the center of the each image around the center of the display surface, and a local angle xcex2 measures an offset of a central axis of each image from the angle xcex1. Each oriented image can then be rendered on the display surface of the circular graphical user interface.